Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

“In fact, I’m alone,” he says, and, to my surprise, he kisses me, which he hasn’t done in years, and I put my hand to my cheek, amazed, for in his watering eyes I see an openness and a clarity that I’d thought lost to our old detentes and clotted dislike, and behind the years his face is the face of the boy who once courted me. As he starts to rise he says, “My love, goodbye.”

  “No,” I say. “You are not alone. I will go. I will take your place,” and I mean it, though I have never been brave, and I fear death, and if I ever loved him it was long ago, but I can’t bear to see his solitude.

  Another knock at the door.

  47

  TIRESIAS

  In life, Tiresias was a prophet. In death, he was the only shade who was fully awake.

  Hades was bounded by Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

  I walk through the fog purposefully, as though I have a destination. There are others nearby, noiseless silhouettes in the translucent grey, but they’re never close enough for me to see their faces. A flaw in the fog, and there before me is a warrior in bronze, blood leaking down his cuirass; I see his eyes through his helmet, and he seems to recognize me, but then the fog swallows him, and when I pursue him I find only footprints in dry sand.

  There’s the sound of rushing just before me, and I come to the bank of a wide river, its far side barely visible. When the others see it they run toward it and wade in, but I hesitate, looking down into the dark water, and then I see their faces as they rise streaming from the cold flow and how their joy has given way to blankness by the time they clamber up the far bank into fields of dust and cinder and asphodel protruding from torn earth, and at last I know where I am. I scramble back from the edge as eager shades push past me.

  A youth with golden hair and a serpent twining around his staff sits on the bank beside me, chin on hand. He says, “The river brings peace, you know.”

  “No,” I say convulsively. “I won’t lose myself.”

  “Much is lost already. I don’t think you even know your name.”

  “What’s in a name?” I say, trembling. “Nameless, I’m still myself, not some empty shade sulking in the dark.”

  “The river is the salve to every woe. It’s the end of every suffering.”

  I shake my head and clasp my arms to my chest, saying nothing.

  “So be it,” sighs the youth, standing. “You’re unlikely to end up thanking me, but I’m used to being cursed for granting favors.”

  “Wait,” I say, as he turns away. “Where will I go? What will become of me? Can I go back to the world?”

  “Never,” he says, “but all of Hell stands open.”

  * * *

  I try to go back but a high wind buffets me and I find nothing but fog, sand and shades rushing by. I follow the river downstream, careful to stay dry, and eventually find stepping stones, barely protruding from the current, leading to the far side. Having nowhere else to go, I pick my way across, though the stones are slippery, and when I look into the flow I recognize dissolution. Strange to be here and have something left to lose.

  The newly dead are confused when they clamber up the bank. They cry out to me, thinking I’m a god, or a lover, or their mothers, and I try to explain but they don’t seem to hear me and soon blunder on into the fog.

  The sky is a flat unchanging grey, and I can never see far. Having nothing to do, and all time before me, I decide I’ll learn all of Hell’s geography.

  I find: empty cities, skewed and choked with dust, the buildings like worn teeth protruding from the sand, as though cities had souls and these were their wreckage. A field where stone doors lie scattered on the ground. A banquet hall abandoned but for two cadaverous men on granite thrones, one of whom stirs as I pass by. The endless dead, some walking steadily but most standing with their backs to the river, saying nothing, letting time flow by.

  I hear the echo of music once, and my heart races but when I run toward the sound it fades out, never to return.

  Sometimes I see Hermes in the grey fields. Often he’ll postpone his business to talk with me, telling me the secrets of gods and of kings, though I know he’s open with me only because there’s nowhere I can go.

  I find hills where the ancient dead wait, standing in ranks on the slopes’ swell and fall. Heads bowed, eyes closed, all face the same direction. They seem to be waiting for something, though in this waste nothing happens.

  I talk to them sometimes, and try to draw them out, but they rarely turn their dull eyes toward me. I ask questions; I touch their faces; I scream at them, my cries dissolving in the birdless silence. Now and then a ghost works its mouth around the dust of ages and its story comes tumbling out, though they seem not to know I’m listening. Theirs was an older Greece, the sun brighter, the sky more vivid, the islands in another order. Animals spoke, and gods and men lived together. They have no reserve, exposing old venality, cowardice, lawless pleasure, extravagant mortal rages. When their faces crumple I say don’t worry, never mind it, everything’s over for you. Their stories done, they fall silent, as though something’s been used up in them, and gape listlessly, never to be roused again.

  I go deep into the foothills, hoping to find some landmark, some break in the hills’ undulations, but there are only silences and endless waiting ghosts, and this goes on and on, and one day I decide that, having come this far, I’ll go on to the end.

  Once the dead looked up as I passed but as the hills descend they’re like stones lined up on the sand, worn by the wind, their features sculpted into polished masks. I press my hand to one and the stone under my palm dissolves into sand like the sand underfoot. As I go deeper the sand becomes finer, and soon the grains are fine as dust, as the sky is the color of dust, and there’s never a wind here, and except for my footsteps the silence is total.

  Time enough. There will be time enough. There will be time enough is what I say to myself, over and over, and these words are the rhythm that puts one foot before the other.

  It’s only when the hills have become a plain and the dead are eroded like stones in a river and I’ve nearly ceased to see the world that I realize I’m not alone, nor have been for some time. Death is beside me, and we walk together a long while and then I ask why these ghosts, why this dust, and where the plain is going.

  There is a white city beyond the curve of the world, he says, and what passes through its gates endures forever. This is Mnemosyne, the city of memory.

  “And is everything there?” I ask, my eyes tearing as I think of the years and loves that slipped away, but Death says, Its gate is narrow, to keep out the world’s profusion and redundancy, and the way is long, longer than ever you walked on earth, and most never come near it but wear away into rivers of sand, rubble of souls, fragments of memory. Nevertheless there are some few, mostly poets and mathematicians, who set off gladly, in the hopes that some part of them—a good phrase, or the intuition for a theorem—will pass through the gate and persist within the city.

  “Will they admit me?”

  That city’s judgments are unknowable.

  He points the way down a path barely paler than the surrounding desert sand, and I’m alone now as I walk under neutral skies, and there are water stains on the dry slopes, and then they’re gone, and I walk a long time, and I cease to see the sky, and I cease to see the path, and even the dead are gone, and there are only the odd stones scattered on the sand, and once a century a wind rises and moves them, and my hand before my face is the color of sand, and years slip by unnoticed, and the city is only an idea, and this desert’s name is eternity, and the wind blows and fades and carries me along, and then, white towers.

  PART VIII

  APHRODITE, CONTINUED

  48

  ATALANTA

  Atalanta was beautiful, and a hero in her own right. She didn’t want to marry. Aphrodite and Death conspired against her.

  I was born with a beauty more than mortal and stood a head taller than the tallest of men. Every morning I went hunting in the hil
ls, and I was always happy; I had friends then, the daughters of my father’s courtiers, who rose with me at first light and tried to keep up. After the hunt we’d sprawl in the grass and watch the sky fade, and as the world lost its light it seemed every day would always be the same. They said my grandfather had been a god, and that it skipped generations, but I could never bring myself to care.

  One day my friends and I were swimming in the river and I saw Hypermnestra smiling and staring into nothing as she wrung out her hair. She looked hunted when I asked what she was thinking, so I pressed her, and she admitted she’d taken a lover. I saw that she was lost, though we had all made promises, and for just a moment the future was colored by fear. “Get out of here,” I said quietly, my contempt just contained; she clambered dripping up the bank, pulling on her chiton as we stood in the shallows, watching her leave.

  She had her wedding in the Aphrodite temple in the woods. The old women wept and the little girls scattered flowers as I watched from the trees where the silence was such that I heard my pulse beating. There was an uncanniness in the stillness and a silent woman with shining golden hair watched me at a distance through the shadows of the branches but I recognized her face from the statues in the temple and ignored her as I did all wicked spirits and soon she disappeared. That night I thought of Hypermnestra and hoped even then she’d come back but the next morning I slept late and when I woke she’d already gone off to her new life of dullness and care, and as the week passed I heard nothing, and my mind drifted.

  It wasn’t long afterwards that my father asked me to walk with him. He said nothing on our first lap around his garden, and then, wringing his hands and looking away from me, he said it was time to think about a wedding.

  “Whose?” I asked.

  “Yours,” he said.

  My rage bloomed coldly and with deadly precision I said, “I will never marry.”

  “But you must,” my father said, desperately reasonable, smiling foolishly.

  In a flat, lethal voice I said, “I’ll marry the first suitor who can out-run me, and be the death of all who can’t.”

  He didn’t mention it again, and I thought the crisis was past, and that everything would stay the same, but it wasn’t long before another friend got engaged, and then another, and by the end of summer they were leaving me in a trickle and the next year they left me in a flood but by then I’d learned not to let it touch me. There were young girls just old enough for the hunt and I tried to talk to them but we hadn’t grown up together and they were strangers who in any case seemed to be afraid of me, and soon I was hunting in the hills alone. For a while my rage came in gusts, and I was pitiless and killed wantonly, but it soon passed, and I forgot them.

  I started spending most of my time in the hills, letting weeks go by without speaking, and sometimes felt I was becoming an animal. What I’d said to my father had faded from my mind but word must have gotten out because one day I found a young man waiting for me at a cross-roads. I saw the fear rising in his eyes as I came nearer—he’d believed in my beauty but not in my size—but he’d been raised to be brave and to strive relentlessly for victory. He said his name was Hippomenes, and his voice shook as he started in on his genealogy but I interrupted, saying, “Here are the terms: we race down this road to my father’s gate. If you win, somehow, then that’s one thing, but if you lose I’m going to put this arrow right through your heart,” and I turned an arrow in my hand so that the razored bronze glinted in the sunlight; I’d only meant to scare him but saw that the threat had been a mistake—he’d been wavering, but I’d touched his pride and now he was going to race.

  We ran down through the hills and for miles over the plain and then into the shadowed wood. He was an athlete, and we were side by side all the way. When my father’s house appeared in the distance he put on a final burst, and he actually thought he was going to win, but in fact I’d kept pace with him only so he wouldn’t give up, sneak off, and say he’d challenged me with impunity; even so, it rankled that he’d briefly thought himself my equal, and when we were twenty yards from the goal I blurred past him effortlessly and touched the gate-post. He’d been sprinting flat out and was still slowing as I turned to draw and string my bow in one motion. As I nocked an arrow a shadow fell on the world, though the sun was high in the cloudless sky; I’d killed many animals but never a man, but what, I thought, could be the difference, and I seemed to see him with greater vividness as he flung up his arms and shouted “No!” as I shot him in the heart.

  He staggered backwards into the arms of a boy whose skin was white as marble, his blue veins glittering in the sun, and as he looked at me his stillness gave way to a longing and an avidity that made my skin crawl and no one had to tell me his name was Death. The blood reek was nauseating so I ran for it, Hippomenes’ ghost close on my heels, squeaking and gesturing urgently like there was something he’d forgotten to tell me when he was alive, so I went all the faster, running for hours, sweat streaming, lost in motion, till I came to a fast river and dove into its green flow. I’d heard ghosts can’t cross water so I stayed in the river till dusk and then I crawled shivering onto the far bank and fell asleep in the sand.

  Years passed and my father became an old man but I didn’t age so much as turn golden. I used every day, and loved velocity, but somehow the time seemed to go missing, the past was full of long swathes of nothing, as though familiar islands had disappeared into the sea. Now and then men came to try for me but most apologized when they saw me and stalked stiffly away; some pretended not to know who I was, acting as though they’d met me by chance while out walking. I often dreamed of the ghost of the boy who’d tried to be my lover, and I wanted to know what he’d wanted to say; whenever I saw him he was standing in the fields in the shadows of clouds and smiling at me but when I talked to him he’d only shake his head, and I’d wake with the feeling of loosing the arrow in my hand. Sometimes I saw the woman with the shining hair watching me from the wood, and when I did I stopped and waited, daring her, for I knew I was the direst thing in those hills, but she’d always just smile at me, as though she knew something I didn’t, and then vanish.

  I saw Melanion in the distance at the cross-roads on the hottest day of the year. I could have gone around him but saw no need to cede the road and didn’t want it said I’d retreated. Up close I saw that he was a tall man, and beautiful the way that horses are; he didn’t flinch when he saw me and a shadow settled on my heart as he looked into my eyes and said calmly that he knew the terms and wanted to race.

  We started running and it was less like a race than like keeping him company. He was one of the fastest men I’d seen, though no match for me, and when we finally came under the cover of the wood I shot ahead, leaving him to plod on alone. Half a mile later he rounded a bend and found me waiting in the middle of the road. “Go home,” I said. “No one saw you come, and no one will see you go. Tell people you couldn’t find me, or that you changed your mind, but in any case go.” I was offering him his life but instead of leaving with it he stepped forward and said, “No one will see…” The golden-haired woman was holding her breath as she watched from the trees and he was so close I could smell his sweat and then his fingertip brushed my clavicle. For the space of a breath I did nothing, and then my knife flashed through the air toward his cheek. He staggered back, sobbing, half his face slathered red; “Run for your life,” I said, and he did.

  It wasn’t long until the day I woke early to shadows that seemed sharper and a new watchfulness in the hills. I was angry as I went out into the cold air with my arrows clattering in my quiver, for I knew, as animals know, that I was being hunted, and I wasn’t surprised when I saw someone waiting at the cross-roads. He was little more than a boy, standing there, and as pale as the moon, blue veins glittering in the long early light. As I steamed in the cold I felt his chill.

  He said, “Race with me to your father’s gate.”

  “What are the stakes?” I asked.

  “If I win,
you come to my kingdom.”

  “And if you lose?”

  “Then every morning will be the first day of summer, and your friends will come back and never leave again, and everything will always stay the same.”

  Despite the glittering menace behind his words I couldn’t keep from grinning, and my heart was light as I said, “Go.”

  He was as fast as the west wind, and I loved him for it, and I ran flat out from the start. My shadow flying over broken stones in the waste by the road and the air was my medium as I pushed off from the dust for to run is to fall and I fell without end as the road had no end and in that morning I was outside of time, and untouchable, and I left him behind.

  I streaked on for miles, alone and lost in motion as I shot over the plain and into the wood and there was only the sweet sting of my breath and the chaos of passing branches. It had been a long time since I’d seen him and I heard no panting, no pounding feet, no sound in the wood but birds singing and the wind, and my skin felt electrified. I finally slowed on a rise and looked back—I could see miles of road behind me but there was nothing there, not even a plume of dust.

  I started walking toward my father’s house, somewhat nonplussed to have beaten the great adversary so easily. This is victory, I thought; the sky was beautiful, the first in an infinite succession of beautiful skies, and I smiled because I’d won everything and I knew I was capable of anything at all and then I noticed that the woman with the shining golden hair was keeping pace with me in the wood. “What do you want?” I called in high good humor, and I wondered how long she’d been following me, and then I saw that she was beckoning. I looked back down the road—still empty—and when I looked back she was disappearing into trees. “Wait,” I said, pushing into the foliage, my heart beating wildly, and I thought she’d gone but then I saw a flash of white among the leaves, and I pursued as she retreated, the branches whipping my face. I found her chiton pooled on the bare earth, and then I burst into a clearing where the light dazzled me, and there she was, right before me, close enough to touch. The world fell away as my eyes followed the lunar surface of her skin to the sun burning on the golden apple in the delta of her thighs.